JOHANNESBURG—When Anthea Moys stepped onto a soccer field to play an 11-man squad, the other team's coach, Wandile Duruwe, commented: "She couldn't kick the ball. She couldn't run. She was unfit."

That was the point. After 10 minutes, the score was 5-0. In the second half spectators took the field to lend a hand. She still lost 12-0.

Her performance wasn't soccer—it was art. Or rather, performance art. Most South Africans are still trying to figure out the difference.

Ms. Moys has taken her work to New York and Berlin, but she confronts an extra dose of bewilderment in her native South Africa, a nation less accustomed to the whimsical world of public and performance art than the U.S. or Europe.

The sometimes-whimsical art form is bewildering to many South Africans.

She is part of a cross-cultural band of South African performance artists, including a "yarn bomber" and a woman who broke her leg swinging from a bridge. They are pushing the country closer to the artistic avant-garde, whether people like it or not.

"Most people aren't like, oh, this is a piece of performance art," said Ms. Moys, a 33-year-old Johannesburg native. "They're like, what the hell is that chick doing?"

South Africa's relative artistic isolation stems from its troubled history. Sanctions against the white-led system of apartheid kept many artists and musicians out of the country until 1994. Nelson Mandela was elected South Africa's first black president that year, and the world began to re-establish ties to the country.

Today, with high unemployment, violent crime and crumbling schools, many South Africans aren't ready to embrace the deeper meaning of an unwatchable soccer match.

Ms. Moys is undeterred. One of her first artistic feats was to ride a stationary bicycle in the popular 60-mile bike race sponsored by a Johannesburg radio station. Wearing a helmet and Spandex, Ms. Moys pedaled furiously as the other bikers whizzed past.

"You lost your wheels, you loser!" one biker shouted.

Winning wasn't the point.

"I'm not very competitive," admits Ms. Moys. "I'm interested in the joy of games and in how people view them."

Anthea Moys

Last year, South Africa's Standard Bank named Ms. Moys its young artist of the year in a new category devoted to performance art. This year's winner is Donna Kukama.

In 2009, she hung a swing from a highway overpass in downtown Johannesburg and clambered onto it, swinging in a white dress. The Johannesburg artist tossed down 10-rand notes, worth roughly $1 each. She was trying to raise questions about value and the divisions between different groups of people in the city. As dozens gathered below to catch the notes, the wooden seat broke and Ms. Kukama crashed 20 feet to the street below, breaking her right leg.

"At the hospital I told the doctor I fell off a swing," Ms. Kukama recalled. "He said, 'How old are you?' " Ms. Kukama is 32.

She is among the South African artists using their performances and public installations to test the fault lines in a society that remains in many ways divided.

Tebogo Munyai, a 30-year-old artist from a mining community on the edge of Johannesburg, erected four iron shacks on a plaza in front of Cape Town's city hall one recent Friday afternoon. He enlisted six men and women from the sprawling townships east of the city center to mix corn meal, do laundry and even quarrel in the fake village. The idea was to bring the rhythms of life in a poor shantytown to the heart of one of Africa's richest cities.

"It was like a movie set. I never thought that I could be involved in art like that," said Wendy Thoane, an unemployed 32-year-old mother whom Mr. Munyai asked to wash clothing and sing lullabies to her year-old son. When visitors asked Ms. Thoane whether she was married to the man milling flour in the shack behind her, she went with the story. She told them yes, he had kicked her out after a fight.

"It makes me think that I can be an actor one day," she said. "Or a dancer."

Just 10 yards away, Kim Gurney was manipulating space and context in another way. For a performance called "Cape Town Under: Third Voice," she opened a manhole cover from the square down to a network of aqueducts Cape Town's Dutch founders built to move water and sewage around the city in the 1700s. She sent classical singer Pauline Theart down to warble what she calls an "extended lullaby" up to the streets above.

Some clapped their hands to their mouths in surprise as they drew close to the open subterranean canal. "Who is she? What does she look like?" they asked of the unseen crooner below.

Pleased by the response, Ms. Gurney said: "It was such a bizarre thing to encounter."

At dawn on a warm, clear morning recently, Isabeau Joubert knit swaths of pink, red and orange yarn onto a wooden bench in central Cape Town. The South African "yarn bomber" fastens colorful bits of needlework to public fixtures like statues, benches and lamp posts.

"I can see people are a bit confused, but I don't like to get into a long explanation and take away from the pure enjoyment of it," said Ms. Joubert, a 32-year-old graphic designer.

Ms. Moys, the artist who lost to the 11-man soccer team, recently had the wind knocked out of her by a black belt in karate. She also squawked her way through bagpipe and singing recitals in Grahamstown, a South African college town.

Ahead of a two-week artistic challenge in February in Geneva, Ms. Moys is preparing to take on an ice hockey team, Swiss wrestlers and alpine horn players. She hopes the show will be a hit in Europe's artsy core.

"South Africans are interested in rugby more than art," Ms. Moys said. "Performance art is still being defined."

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